Disposable nannies? Some questions on the role of domestic servants in the political economy of South Africa

Abstract:

This paper offers some tentative and exploratory
comments on the problem of how to locate domestic labour
within the totality of social relations in the South African
social formation. The precise relation of domestic labour
to capital has been the subject of much controversy within
'the domestic labour debate'. All the contributors have
stressed the importance of housework - previously neglected
because of its' social invisibility and privatized nature.
However, the debate has been conducted at a very high level
of theoretical abstraction, although many of the questions
raisea within it - such as the relation between domestic
labour and the value of labour power - arc questions which
can only be posed at the level of concrete class practices
within a specific social formation. Furthermore, many
contributors have reduced a materialist analysis of women's
subordinate position under capitalism to an analysis of
domestic labour. To avoid this narrow economism Molyneux
has effectively argued the case for moving "beyond the
domestic labour debate" to include "a consideration of the
broader significance of the household and the relations
within it for the wider society, without losing sight of the
specific position of women within these structures".
(Molyneux, 1979:22). This is the insight this paper attempts
to build upon. It attempts to show that the household is the
site of important contradictions and that domestic servants
are 'bearers' of some of the characteristic antagonisms
of the social formation as a whole. It suggests that the
reproduction of labour power which takes place within the
household is a crucial subject of struggle: what constitutes adequate reproduction for the various categories of the
working class, is a subject of class struggle; the fact
that women perform most of the domestic labour involved
in the reproduction of labour power is a subject of feminist
struggle. The relation between class and feminist struggle
is the main point of contention in current marxist-feminist
analysis.